IT IS an annual festival of song best known in the UK for dreadful music, outrageous costumes and highly suspect political voting.
This year, however, a group of schoolchildren have decided to create their own Eurovision Song Contest to help them learn more about Europe.
The primary five pupils at Yester Primary School, Gifford, will be hoping their song for Scotland will get
more than "nul points" in the vote.
The "Schoolovision 2009" contest has been set up by Yester teacher Michael Purves, who has spent several months working on the project with his pupils.
On Friday, all the hard work will culminate in a "live" vote, which will see the East Lothian classroom linked up to other schools in 31 European countries.
Each school agreed to choose a song representative of their country, practise it and video it, before uploading it to the project blog.
This week the children will be viewing the songs and deciding on their favourites, before casting their votes in the same way as is done in the real Eurovision contest – though hopefully without the politics.
The winning country will be sent a specially commissioned trophy, which has been ordered by Mr Purves.
The project was created by the teacher as a way of allowing his pupils to become more involved in the use of computers, as well as providing a more innovative way of learning about Europe.
"We have held various test webcam conferences recently involving the different schools, which has allowed the children to ask their peers across Europe questions they'd like answered about each country," he said.
"It has been a really great way for them to learn. There's been a lot of hard work to get it this far and the children really enjoyed putting together their song and the video.
"We are all looking forward to the vote and I'm just hoping there are no problems with the live link-up. We will go through the schools alphabetically, and I'm sure the voting will be very fair."
Among the countries taking part are Wales, Portugal, Germany, France, Italy, Austria, Belgium, Norway, the Czech Republic, Poland, Cyprus and Bulgaria.
England is also competing, with the pupils at the Church Aston Infants School in Shropshire all helping to compose their song, Our Little School Is In A Village.
Headteacher Anne Garner said the event had been great fun.
"We only have 42 pupils here and every one of them has been involved in this," she said. "It has been huge fun, and we've just been watching some of the other entries on the website. Michael has been great, and he has really pushed all the teachers involved in this to learn new skills, and make the competition really special.
"I hope there won't be any tactical voting – I'd be appalled if we got 'nul points'! I'm sure it will all be done in the right spirit though."
Whatever the result for Yester, the school will emerge a winner, with Mr Purves already praised by the British Council, under whose eTwinning programme the contest was created.
Schoolovision has also been shortlisted for a major prize at a British Council event in Birmingham in July, which will showcase the best examples of creativity and innovation across the whole of the Lifelong Learning Programme in Europe.
And it was described as "one of the finest examples of creativity and innovation from the eTwinning programme".
Schoolovision 2009 is being held on Friday, just ahead of this year's official Eurovision Song Contest, which this year will be filmed in Moscow, Russia.
